‘We will build a garden more magnificent than Schönbrunn,’ she said, hoping to tempt him with mention of the famed Austrian palace gardens in Vienna. ‘A tribute to your conquests,’ she urged. ‘A legacy.’
‘An heir is a legacy,’ he had grunted.
Now, Bonaparte’s cool tone broke her thoughts. ‘My advisers want me to ask you if you are still capable.’
Do they? she fumed. Do they want to check the contents of my rags for bloodstains? Do they ask my maids? No doubt. Fouché and Talleyrand are spies after all. I will have to be more careful.
‘Of course I am still capable,’ she lied. ‘We have time, my love.’
Josephine could not say why her menses came so rarely when other women’s were as strong and regular as the cycles of the moon. Perhaps they would begin again. Perhaps Bonaparte was right. The waters at Plombières were renowned for their restorative properties. She closed her eyes and breathed deep, imagining warming herself by sliding into the thermal baths, immersing herself up to her chin. In the autumn the town could be very pretty, all the terracotta roofs and creamy stone walls nestled in a valley of orange and gold leaves, and the church spire rising above it all. Yes, to soak in the mineral waters of Plombières this autumn could be a delight.
‘Remember, you do have my two children who adore you as their own papa,’ she said. ‘They are your heirs.’
‘It is not enough. The child must be from my bloodline. A Bonaparte.’
What if you are not capable? she wanted to say. What if the problem lies with you? But she was not a fool and kept silent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Winter 1801–Autumn 1802
‘Is it true? You wish me to marry Louis Bonaparte?’ Hortense stood in the doorway, her crisp white nightgown falling straight like a column to her toes. Her golden hair was loose, her blue eyes welling like puddles. It tore her mother’s heart.
Josephine pushed aside her garden sketches, the plans for her Grand Serre, the watercolours of great palms rising up to a glass ceiling. She stood up from her desk. ‘Forgive me, but it is for the best. You are eighteen! Something had to be arranged. I know Bonaparte. He will send you far away, he will arrange a marriage for you to some foreign prince to make an alliance, and I couldn’t bear to lose you.’
These were all good reasons, Josephine had convinced herself. She must not weaken. It was the only way to keep them all together.
‘But Louis?’ Hortense’s voice was pure horror. ‘He has never shown me the least affection. Don’t you remember the way he lashed out at me that summer when we first met?’
‘He has matured since then.’
‘But, Maman, he has such disdain for women. You know how he speaks of us. How could I ever be happy with a man who thinks all women deceitful whores?’ Her voice was strained to a whisper.
‘He is a soldier, that is all,’ Josephine said dismissively. ‘He has spent too much time in the company of men. He does not know women. You, my darling, are the sweetest, most kind, most generous angel. You will change his mind. You will convince him of your charms simply by being yourself.’
Hortense shivered.
‘Here, have my shawl.’ Josephine put her arms around her daughter, wrapping her tightly in the cashmere. Swaddling her. ‘Don’t you think it would be lovely to always be close to us here at Malmaison? Summer garden parties, plays and music. Your children running in the garden. Oh, how I will spoil them! Isn’t that a much better thought than some stuffy foreign court where you know no one? Where you will always be an outsider?’
Josephine stroked her daughter’s face. Her cheeks were still full and plump like a young girl, her skin soft and unblemished. How had the years passed so quickly? She remembered Hortense as a toddler running up to her with such affection for this mother she barely knew after Josephine returned from the convent. Always trusting. That day Hortense had let her cheeks be kissed and kissed, her hair caressed. Josephine had whispered into the crown of her daughter’s head that she would never let her go.
‘I wish I could talk to Eugene.’
‘If he were here he would advise you to accept.’
Hortense did not look convinced and her voice held a note of defiance. ‘You cannot make me marry him.’
‘It is for you to decide, of course. Bonaparte would not permit this marriage if it was against your wishes.’ Josephine turned away from her daughter, letting them both feel the distance grow.
‘Why did you not tell me yourself? Why did I have to hear this from Papa’s secretary?’
Guilt. Josephine was pierced by it. Because I was afraid, she thought but did not say.
‘I wanted to marry for love, Maman.’ Her voice was an ache.
Josephine ducked her eyes from Hortense’s gaze. ‘Oh, Hortense, sometimes love grows in the strangest of places. You will see. Your marriage to Louis will keep our family together.’ Josephine steeled her heart. ‘It strengthens us, don’t you see? My daughter, tied to another Bonaparte. Your children … will unite us.’ Josephine’s lips stuck to her teeth, but she continued. ‘This is your duty to our family. For our security.’
Hortense let her tears fall. ‘If I do this it will be for you, Maman. Only you.’
Hortense’s wedding was held four days after the New Year in the Tuileries Palace. Once the decision was made there had seemed no sense in delaying. Besides, Josephine hoped the marriage would soon bring a baby into their home. A baby would bring her daughter joy. Everything would be well.
But as she watched Hortense’s thin shoulders shake in her simple white gown, Josephine had to grip the sides of her chair to stop herself leaping up to halt the proceedings. Her daughter was ashen, her gaze fixed on the floor. Louis stood apart from Hortense, thin and hunched, chest caved. His head was turned and his hair fell to one side of his face, obscuring his eyes from her. Too late, she had already witnessed Louis’s hateful glower when Bonaparte led Hortense to his side. What must her husband have promised Louis to bring him to this altar?
Even despite the roaring fires, there was no mistaking the chill. As the religious blessing was bestowed at a makeshift altar within the palace, she prayed for her daughter. Would Hortense forgive her this? she wondered. Hortense had deliberately refused the embroidered gown Josephine had ordered for her and the diamond headpiece. She stood at the altar in a plain dress with a simple necklace of pearls hanging like frozen teardrops. Josephine felt the sting of her daughter’s rebuke. It was clear to all that Hortense had dressed herself as a virgin sacrifice.
She had been too soft with her daughter by sheltering her from the realities of life. Without a good match, she would be nothing, have nothing. Romantic love did not keep you safe. It could not give you a home. Hadn’t Josephine had to sacrifice herself to do her duty to her family? Josephine heard her mother’s voice in those words. Those words were the same ones she had heard while still grieving the loss of her sister: It is for our security, it is your duty. Her marriage to Alexandre was to save them all. She wondered now if her mother had felt as sickened as she did as the words came out of her mouth. Did she hear the smack of them as they fell and think of herself when she too was married to a man they all hoped would save the family fortunes? Now Josephine looked at Hortense, white-faced and trembling, and wondered if she would repeat these same words of duty and security to a future daughter. Hortense would not meet her mother’s eye.
Hortense fell pregnant soon after her wedding night and for that Josephine was relieved. Love for this child would eclipse her disgust for Louis, she was certain. There was much one would endure for the love of a child.
Bonaparte delighted in the news of Hortense’s pregnancy. ‘All will be well between them now,’ he assured Josephine. She wanted to believe him.
Hortense was distant with her now, but Josephine remembered how much she missed her own mother during her pregnancy. It would be better for Hortense to be close to her. Hortense would soon come around to that way of thinking.
Bonaparte
approved her plans for a Grand Serre and by the end of winter the foundations had been laid. Josephine’s glasshouse began to rise, pane by fragile pane.
In spring, Bonaparte signed the treaty of Amiens and brought an end to war with Britain. All through the summer at Malmaison, Josephine was besieged by English visitors who were allowed back into France for the first time since the Revolution. She took them out in her phaeton to admire the vistas and showed them the rising spectre of her Grand Serre. Incomplete, it was jagged and sharp, all iron ribs and slabs of glass. The use of metal was an innovation, the first glasshouse of its kind to be this large. She described her plans, brought out the artist’s watercolours, but the British aristocracy were uninterested, only titillated by scandal. It was her reputation as a courtesan and unfaithful wife that brought them to her in droves. She knew this, but entertained them anyway. Peace and goodwill were the order of the day, no matter what they said about her.
At long last a letter came from Baudin’s expedition and Josephine was overjoyed to hear that Baudin was sending a ship back to France with treasures from New Holland. She made plans to extend her nurseries in preparation for the arrival of the shipment, while Bonaparte built roads and bridges and public parks all over Paris. The people loved him for it. By the end of the summer, Bonaparte was elected consul for life.
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
‘We have made France secure,’ he told her.
Autumn came and the days shortened, leaving fewer hours for the masons and the glaziers, yet still the glasshouse grew. The furnaces arrived on wagons drawn by mules and she watched them bricked into place ready to give much-needed heat through the winter months. The glass panes twisted on ropes as they were lifted slowly into the air. Progress was painful, unbearable to watch. She cringed whenever she heard glass shatter and prayed no one was standing beneath it.
Hortense was visiting when a spate of bad weather brought construction to a standstill. Strong winds and rain buffeted the frame and Josephine watched from her salon window as darkness fell, listening to the wind howl and imagining that every pane of glass would be smashed into smithereens by morning. Hortense had no interest in visiting the Grand Serre. She had spent the day playing her piano, her back to the windows that overlooked the garden.
Josephine listened to her daughter play with desperate sadness. The closeness between them had not returned and she didn’t know how to mend the hurt.
‘It is getting late.’ Hortense rose from her piano, her body awkward with the weight of her unborn child. ‘I must leave.’
‘Stay with us,’ Josephine implored her. ‘Your visits are so short. Why don’t you stay the night with us here? The weather tonight is foul.’
Hortense shook her head. ‘Louis forbids it.’
‘Nonsense. How could he expect you to ride home in this awful weather, with you in this condition?’ Josephine rubbed her daughter’s swollen stomach. ‘We will have a quiet night beside the fire. Bonaparte will read to us.’
Josephine looked across to her husband, lost inside a book in a high-backed chair. She wanted him to intervene, to tell Hortense it would be alright to stay. Louis could not keep a daughter from her mother. But Bonaparte did not look up from his page.
‘I cannot stay. You know what horrid things they write about me in the papers.’ Hortense glanced over to Bonaparte’s chair. ‘Louis believes them.’
‘Oh dearest, he cannot believe those lies.’
‘You don’t understand. He has said he would kill me if it were true.’
Josephine gasped. ‘He does not mean what he says.’ Surely, her daughter was mistaken.
‘You have not heard the coldness of his tone.’
Hortense was too innocent, Josephine thought, she wasn’t used to Bonaparte men and their moods. It will get better, Josephine wanted to tell her.
‘He is sick, Maman.’
Josephine refused to understand her meaning. ‘If Louis is not well then you must devote yourself to his recovery.’
‘He is cruel.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ She drew Hortense away from Bonaparte. The rain was lashing at the windows.
The words burst out of her daughter. ‘I no longer laugh, for every giggle is assumed to be at his expense. I cannot cry, because he accuses me of manipulation. He allows me no friends. He suspects my every move. There is something so very black in his moods. Everything I say is wrong.’
‘He is jealous, protective, he loves you.’
Hortense shook her head. ‘He does not. He has told me so.’
‘Love sometimes takes time to grow. Look at me and Bonaparte. You are young. You must learn to mould yourself to his desires, as I have done. Then you will have tranquillity.’
‘He is ill in other ways, Maman.’ Hortense pleaded with her eyes. ‘There is a skin disease. His doctors warn that it might be passed to me.’
Hortense would not let Josephine look away. Hortense was trying to tell her something with her ice-blue eyes, stripped of innocence. They were eyes now open to the ways of men. But Josephine did not want to understand, did not want to hear what her daughter was saying.
‘He makes me lie with him.’
Josephine felt her daughter’s words like a punch to her chest. She could not listen, could not console her daughter, for that would be to admit that for the price of a house and garden, for the roots reaching deep beneath the earth and anchoring her into place, she had sold her daughter to a monster. ‘You cannot show repugnance of him. You must not complain. Patience and kindness is the only way. Consider my example. Am I not the happiest wife and mother you have ever seen?’
Hortense raised her blue eyes, those wet pools of despair. ‘Are you, Maman?’
Josephine avoided her gaze. ‘Stay the night here, I implore you. Bonaparte will speak with Louis.’
‘That will only make it worse. I must go.’
‘Hortense, stay!’
Hortense paused at the door. ‘You gave me to him, Maman. It is he I must obey now, not you.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Autumn 1802
‘I hear she is building a glasshouse. She means to outdo the Jardin des Plantes.’
‘And welcome to our home,’ Anne said to Labillardière with a wry smile. He had arrived on their doorstep with his statement as a form of greeting.
Behind him, Marthe shifted into view. Long-necked and eyes round, with her dress ruffled. A storm had blown up and Anne opened her door wider, letting them be swept into her house with the fallen leaves.
Félix too looked surprised. ‘I was not expecting you.’
‘What do you know of it?’
‘You mean the First Consul’s wife? A glasshouse for her garden? I know nothing of it.’
‘They do not come to see you here?’
‘Of course not!’ Anne interrupted the interrogation. What would the ruler of France want with them? The savant could be tiresome with his rudeness; it was time he was taught how to behave. ‘Welcome to our home. I am pleased to see you have brought your wife with you.’ Anne smiled heartily at Marthe, beckoning her into the salon.
Labillardière removed his coat and hat. The rooms of their home were low-ceilinged and both Marthe and Labillardière seemed to tower in them. She was relieved when they folded themselves into chairs.
Anne saw Labillardière’s eyes drift to her husband’s wooden chest of seeds that they kept in pride of place on a sideboard.
Marthe’s eyes fell to Anne’s stomach, and her eyes went wider still.
‘I will bring us drinks.’ Anne fled, not wanting to see the pain on Marthe’s face. She was four months along in her pregnancy and already large with it. Everyone said it would be another boy from the way she was carrying. Anne didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, but from the start she was eager to meet this new little one. Would he be loud or quiet, serious or quick to laugh? Would she love to run and play hide-and-seek like her brothers, or would she curl up on her father’s lap? E
ach child had their own peculiarities and as soon as Anne knew for sure that she was pregnant, she began to imagine the child growing inside her. He would be a gardener like his father, Anne had decided.
Anne put a pot of coffee on the stove. She felt for Marthe. Jacques should have written to tell them he was coming, then she could have prepared his wife for the news. The cook, Marie, chided her from the kitchen. The boys, Abraham and Philippe, nearly collected her as they tumbled past and rolled into the parlour, chasing one another around the furniture and leaving muddy footprints in their wake.
‘You have met our boys then,’ Anne said too brightly to Marthe when she returned.
Marthe nodded, lips thin.
‘There has been a letter from Baudin. He is sending back a ship, have you heard?’ Labillardière had returned to badgering Félix.
‘Thouin mentioned it, yes.’
‘She will want the specimens.’
Félix shrugged. ‘I cannot see how we can stop that. The consul funded this expedition.’
‘France funded the expedition!’ Labillardière shot back.
Félix put out his hands to calm him. ‘There will be opportunity for your study, Thouin will take care of it.’
Anne studied the botanist. He made no attempt to hide the thunderous thoughts from his face. Once there had been a time when they enjoyed an easier friendship with this difficult man and Anne missed those times. There had been real affection when the two men talked of the great wonders and shared hardships of their travels. When Labillardière’s journal had been published and his collections returned to him, he had been a happier person, a better friend. Now he seemed consumed by his worries and obsessed with keeping this new collection of seeds from the First Consul’s wife.
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